thanksgiving prep Archives

Natalie of Good Girl Style joins us each month to share incredible desserts with Big Girls, Small Kitchen readers–desserts that are entirely gluten-free, but not like obviously gluten-free. That means no specialty flours or hard-to-find ingredients, just cream and milk and sugar. Her take is especially welcome at Thanksgiving, where any baker can contribute a treat that all in attendance can happily eat. If you’d like a plated dessert in addition to the candy below, check out Natalie’s Baked Apples!

Cashews and cranberries herald the holiday season in these luxurious goodies. A delicious twist on the traditional pecan-caramel-chocolate turtles, these candies make the perfect addition to the Thanksgiving dessert table. Wrap them up in a pretty cellophane bag and they make the perfect hostess gift. That is, if you can keep from eating them all yourself in one sitting! This recipe is actually two-in-one, so you’ll get about 18 turtles and a basketful of caramels as a bonus to streamline your holiday baking.

A candy thermometer (you can pick one up at the grocery store) will make this recipe easier, but if you don’t have one you can use the old-fashioned cold-water method as described below. Be sure to stir constantly, but not whisk, to prevent the mixture from scorching. Be careful and don’t try to taste the caramel: seriously, it will burn you immediately!

If you had told me a year ago if I’d dream of a Thanksgiving stuffing made with mushrooms, I would have called you crazy. I’ve long had a thing against mushrooms (sorry), but that thing changed the moment I threw a handful of weird-looking chopped-up maitake mushrooms to a hot pan for a chicken recipe and smelled that smell. It was rich, nutty, irresistible.

Since I’m not in charge of the Thanksgiving dressing at our party–we make my grandma’s delicious recipe, which has both bread and chestnuts–I haven’t created any stuffings or dressings. Yet once I realized how simple the whole deal was–stuffing is just a delightful carb, meant to offset rich turkey skin and gravy–I had the best time layering rich challah cubes with as much flavor as my pantry and fridge could muster. Though bacon and those elegant maitakes co-star, leeks are a serious contender for best supporting player. Their saucy richness helps tie the bread, vegetables, and meat together.

If you plan to tote this dressing to someone else’s event, you can make it in advance up until the second half of the baking. Contribute it to someone else’s party covered in foil, then have your host reheat it til the top browns–the precise oven temperature and timing are less important than the browning.

I’ll have one more Thanksgiving idea for you on Monday. Stay tuned! (Here’s what we’ve covered so far.)

P.S. If Stove Top is your thing, have I got ideas for you! See them here.

Natalie of Good Girl Style joins us each month to share incredible desserts with Big Girls, Small Kitchen readers–desserts that are entirely gluten-free, but not like obviously gluten-free. That means no specialty flours or hard-to-find ingredients, just fruit, spices, and brown sugar. This Thanksgiving, be sure that gluten-free eaters have a delicious, not-too-decadent choice on the dessert table with today’s baked apples. Another option? Maple Crème Brûlée.

Oh, the goodness of apple season. All of the spices that smell like home melt into butter and brown sugar inside sweet yet tart apples. There couldn’t be a more comforting scent or taste, I don’t think. These baked apples are a healthier alternative to apple pie (no crust!) and are so much easier to put together. If you have a last-minute guest coming over, you most likely have all of the ingredients to make this tasty and cozy dessert. And then there’s the added bonus of a house that smells like autumn embodied.

You’ll want to look for firm apples that hold up well to baking, such as Macintosh. Soft apples that are good for eating, such as Red Delicious, won’t be firm enough to withstand baking alone. Be sure not to core the apples all the way through, as you want the bottom intact to hold onto all of the melting sugar and butter goodness. These are best served fresh from the oven with a large serving of vanilla ice cream. If you only need to serve two, this recipe can be easily halved.

When I opened this series about Thanksgiving foods you could contribute to a dinner you weren’t hosting, I wrote that my family’s own Thanksgiving traditions rarely varied and so the whole series was kind of vicarious. That claim wasn’t entirely true, though: Some years we bake five desserts and some years six. Some years we stick place cards on gourds, some years on cookies.

And some years we make Uncle Brad’s Health Salad and some years we don’t.

First, you should know that health salad has no verifiable link to Uncle Brad. [ed: found the link. Uncle B liked it and asked for the recipe. My mom gave it to him with one modification: the copious measure of sugar was halved. The salad, therefore, was probably not that good.] We always thought he brought it once to our party, decades ago, but last I checked, he had no recollection of this. Anyway, the salad doesn’t seem too much like him: it’s plain, it’s not particularly festive, it’s arguably not worth the stomach space when there are biscuits and turkey skin available. That’s the reason, some years, we don’t make the slaw: we bet no one will eat any.

The reason the slaw appears, when it does, is that a forkful tastes fresh, though you can make the whole salad ahead of time, and the texture has that crunchy-raw bite that’s welcome on a plate of buttery and soft things–both on Thursday itself and through the indulgent long weekend to follow.

If you host or a attend a Thanksgiving dinner where you think such a thing as a salad would get eaten, I have another reason you should make slaw. You can commit this recipe to heart, right now. (It’s not exactly Uncle Brad’s recipe, or my mom’s, but the taste sits right with me.)

All you need to know is a proportion. For each half a cabbage, you want one apple, one carrot, one pepper and one onion. To dress the thing, equal parts: 1/4 cup each of oil, sugar, and vinegar, heated up with a touch of soy sauce and some minced garlic (or garlic powder as I discovered on a recent weekend trip). The hot dressing melts the cabbage in the most delightful way. Vary the flavor with spices or a hot pepper, if you like, but that’s really the whole recipe for a dish that you can shop for and whip up for people even far from your own (garlic powder-free) kitchen comfort zone.

Which is to say, while slaw makes an impact on the holiday table, knowing slaw by heart makes an impact on the people who are watching you cook, and if you care to impress them, well, there’s that.

Before they were sweet, pies were savory. The dough that bakes up into our beloved flaky crust was, way back when, merely a convenient holder of filling, a means for peripatetic medieval types to wrap up meat or vegetables and take them on the go. Sort of like a pop tart.

Now that a pie usually refers to the kind of double-crusted or meringue-topped thing of dessert beauty (or terror, if dough always seems to stick to your rolling pin), I love the idea of taking the pastry back to its roots in my holiday cooking this year–whether at Thanksgiving or Christmas, or sometime in between.

This is happening in two ways. One, we’re making savory pies, not sweet ones; and two, we’re choosing a rustic presentation over a perfect, fussy one. Put away your rolling pins and deep-dish fluted pie pans. This is going to be simple.

At your pie party, I envision an array of savory pastries, with crust and filling mixed and matched to suit your tastes. To add even more visual fun, play around with shapes, too. There are mini galettes, dough wrapped around filling that’ll disappear in three bites. There are long and skinny galettes containing bright seasonal vegetables; they’re to be cut into manageable squares for serving. Others are more or less round, like, well, pies. We can even pick and choose the name of these savories: galette, crostata, pie, tart, tartlet, pizette. Though some of these have specific meanings and others are sort of made up, a good diverse spread should have good diverse names – don’t you think?

The first recipe here makes a couple of Apple Crostatas. With a whole-wheat crust and a melted brie topping, the cute rounds make an awesome vegetarian lunch (with a green salad) if you’re not having a pie party or looking for a great starter for Thanksgiving.

This post is sponsored by Lactalis, who provided cheese and compensation. All opinions, of course, are my own. Thanks for supporting the sponsors that keep BGSK delicious! If you’d like to enter to win $50 worth of your own Président cheese, visit ArtOfCheese.com, where you can download a coupon and enter the Pinterest sweepstakes, plus find more holiday recipes and product information.

Recently, I told my friend Taylor that re-imagining weeknight cooking in terms of formats and formulas, rather than exact recipes, would simplify his daily dinners. Meaning, if you know you love pasta, you should always have pasta and potential sauce ingredients around, the same way if you like to wear pencil skirts and silk blouses, you’ll stock good skirts, tops, and pumps, not go in search of one perfect outfit at the department store.

Once you get the hang of the method, it really is a more fun, more delicious, and less wasteful way to shop, cook, and eat than going nuts with planning Monday breakfast and Tuesday dinner and Wednesday leftovers and then penning perfect shopping lists. (You can read all my advice for Taylor here.)

One of my favorite formats is “the Franny’s vegetable format,” named after Franny’s, the greatest restaurant on Flatbush Avenue. Years before I moved to Brooklyn, the restaurant opened as a neighborhood pizzeria, albeit with a cheffy following. Now that there’s a cookbook and a spin-off, it’s more of a destination, but I live in the neighborhood and so for me, it retains the neighborhood vibe. Anyway, when I go there, I don’t always order pizza. I’d rather veg out on the vegetable appetizers, which are always rich and original because Franny’s unleashes the wood-burning oven on beets, sunchokes, and green beans to exquisite effect, then dresses them with vinaigrette, shredded cheese, and nuts.

To bring the format to the Thanksgiving table, I rescued green beans from the casserole dish and threw them on the roasting pan instead. Of course, I don’t have a wood-burning oven, but the home oven does a solid job of blackening and shrinking the green beans until their flavor is condensed and their texture snackable (I can’t totally credit Franny’s for the green bean roasting thing–my immediate family is also obsessed). Cider vinegar anchors the dressing, bringing needed tang, which is balanced yet again with richness–in the form of Parmesan cheese and sunflower seeds.

You don’t have to wait until Thanksgiving to make this tangle of green beans, but if you’re a guest looking for a signature contribution to someone else’s dinner, this is a good option–not least because it scales well and tastes great at room temperature. And if you want to vary the vegetable, the vinegar, the cheese or the nut, do so: it’s all just a format.